09/19/2011

How Mushrooms Help Fight Cancer

According to Dr. Fuhrman, mushrooms are a "newcomer" to the disease prevention discussion. He say that the science is just starting to be understood.

Mushrooms help with autoimmune diseases, but the role they play in destroying abnormal cells is fascinating.

To simply Dr. Fuhrman's argument compounds found in mushrooms help to identify damaged and abnormal cells and remove them. We did a quick search to back up this claim and found several very interesting studies. One in particular is titled "The Pharmacological Potential Of Mushrooms."

That article states that:

"The medicinal use of mushrooms has a very long tradition in the Asian countries, whereas their use in the Western hemisphere has been slightly increasing only since the last decades."

It concludes by saying:

"The spectrum of detected pharmacological activities of mushrooms is very broad.... a rapid increase in the application of mushrooms for medicinal purposes can be expected."

Dr. Fuhrman explains that, common mushrooms (the ones you get in the store) contain "lectins" which are proteins that bind only to abnormal cells, and marking them for death and making it impossible for these cells to replicate.

Dr. Fuhrman states that in "one recent study, women who ate at least 10 grams of mushrooms a day (equivalent to one small mushroom) had a 64 percent decrease in breast cancer."

Cooking Tip: These compounds exist whether the mushroom is cooked or not. An excellent way of cooking all these great foods together is the PEERtrainer Energy Soup, which people have been enjoying for several years. It contains mushrooms, onions, greens, good fat in the form of cococnut milk.